By Jonas Bernstein
STAFF WRITER
MOSCOW - Politician and businessman Boris Berezovsky said Thursday he has turned to his lawyers after Forbes magazine published a scathing article that accuses Berezovsky of complicity in murder and portrays him as "the godfather of Russia's godfathers."
Berezovsky, one of Russia's leading financiers, said he had asked his lawyer to begin a "legal investigation" into "slander" by Forbes during an interview on NTV Independent Television's Hero of the Day program, but he stopped short of pledging to sue.
The article, published in the Dec. 30, 1996, edition of Forbes and entitled "Is he the Godfather of the Kremlin?" makes several sensational accusations.
It states, for example, that Berezovsky "started his [LogoVAZ] auto dealership in close collaboration with the powerful Chechen criminal gangs."
The article then cites a Moscow police report that quotes Berezovsky as telling a member of Moscow's Solntsevo mafia: "I already have a krysha [protection]. Talk to the Chechens."
It also says that ORT Russian Public Television chief Vladislav Listyev was murdered in March 1995 after he got caught between "two ruthless characters" - Berezovsky, who was a member of ORT's board of directors, and Sergei Lisovsky, head of Premier SV advertising and also an ORT board member.
The last lines of the article are: "Is Boris Berezovsky the godfather of Russia's godfathers? It sure looks that way."
Earlier Thursday, after a ceremony in which he was awarded the title "Philanthropist of the Year" by the Russian Association for the Advancement of Science and Education, Berezovsky, now a deputy head of Russia's Security Council, was asked about the Forbes article.
In a prepared statement, Berezovsky called the report "a rare and regrettable example of the Western mass media falling victim to a disinformation campaign which is being carried out purposefully by communist circles with the aim of discrediting the administration of President Yeltsin."
He called the article a "fabrication" made up of "direct lies about me personally and other representatives of business circles who backed the campaign of President Yeltsin, which have appeared over the last several months in various communist, nationalist, fascist publications, and in the Russian yellow press."
A Russian-language version of the article was published Dec. 14 in the opposition newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya, which cited Forbes as the source.
"Characteristically, Sovietskaya Rossiya, the mouthpiece of the national bolsheviks, published the Russian version of this article even before the Forbes magazine came out, which is evidence of open coordination between the two publications," Berezovsky said in his statement.
Berezovsky said it was ironic that Forbes calls itself "The Capitalist Tool."
"It is undoubtedly funny that a magazine which is a mouthpiece of capitalism - a capitalist tool - in this case became a mouthpiece of communist and nationalist propaganda," he said.
Yevgeny Popov, Sovietskaya Rossiya's deputy chief editor, dismissed the charge of collusion with Forbes and said the article was simply a translation, as did Lawrence Minard, Forbes' managing editor. A Forbes publicity official said copies of the article had been released to wire agencies including Itar-Tass on Dec. 16.
"It sounds to me like conspiracy theories are still alive and well in Moscow," said Minard. "The Capitalist Tool does not normally get in bed with the communists."
The article attempts to establish a pattern whereby Berezovsky and his friends have made fortunes by securing middleman monopolies to sell cars from AvtoVAZ, advertising from ORT and plane tickets from Aeroflot among other enterprises. The beauty of the scheme, the article alleges, is that in each case Berezovsky's or his friends' concerns took the money from customers and then paid AvtoVAZ, ORT or Aeroflot only much later and at high profit margins.
AvtoVAZ, for example, went along with being milked, according to Forbes, due to a carrot-and-stick policy: "The carrot: an envelope full of cash to car executives. The stick: a bullet in the head."
But the most sensational charges in the Forbes article concern the Listyev murder. Listyev, a popular game show host and television magnate, was killed shortly after he was named to take over ORT and promised to impose a moratorium on advertising until an "ethical" system could be introduced.
The magazine claims that Lisovsky, whose Premier SV agency had then and still has today a virtual monopoly on placing ads on ORT, demanded Listyev pay him $100 million in damages for the moratorium.
"Listyev found a European company (name undisclosed) willing to buy the ORT advertising franchise," the article states. "Listyev asked Boris Berezovsky to act as transfer agent and hand over the $100 million to Lisovsky. Berezovsky took the cash and stalled Lisovsky; he would get his money in three months, Berezovsky explained."
The magazine claims Listyev told friends he might be killed.
In the article, Forbes states the information concerning the Listyev case came from "the organized crime unit of the Moscow police department."
In a telephone interview Thursday, Vladimir Grigoriev, Premier SV's vice president, called the accusations concerning the $100 million "laughable" and "unreal."
- Staff writer Astrid Wendlandt contributed to this report.